Using Vagrant to set up a VM with KVM/qemu without VirtualBox

Question

I'm getting started Vagrant and want to use it with KVM/qemu (and the Virtual Machine Manager GUI), instead of installing VirtualBox. So I first installed Vagrant:

$ vagrant --version
Vagrant 1.9.1

$ vagrant box list
There are no installed boxes! Use `vagrant box add` to add some

As per these posts, I require vagrant-libvirt for it to work with KVM, so I installed that next:

$ vagrant plugin list
vagrant-libvirt (0.0.37)
vagrant-share (1.1.6, system)

Next, I to add a CentOS(7) box using vagrant box add "centos/7" and selected libvirt, when prompted. After which, I ran vagrant init and didn't encounter any errors:

$ vagrant init centos/7
A `Vagrantfile` has been placed in this directory. You are now
ready to `vagrant up` your first virtual environment! Please read
the comments in the Vagrantfile as well as documentation on
`vagrantup.com` for more information on using Vagrant.

However, vagrant up seems to be erroring out, like so:

$ vagrant up
No usable default provider could be found for your system.

Vagrant relies on interactions with 3rd party systems, known as
"providers", to provide Vagrant with resources to run development
environments. Examples are VirtualBox, VMware, Hyper-V.

The easiest solution to this message is to install VirtualBox, which
is available for free on all major platforms.

If you believe you already have a provider available, make sure it
is properly installed and configured. You can see more details about
why a particular provider isn't working by forcing usage with
`vagrant up --provider=PROVIDER`, which should give you a more specific
error message for that particular provider.

• Here's the provider section in the Vagrantfile

  config.vm.provider :libvirt do |domain|
      domain.driver = "qemu"
      domain.memory = 512
      domain.cpus = 1
  end
  

• I tried modifying it to:

  config.vm.provider :libvirt do |domain|
      domain.driver = "kvm"
      domain.host = 'localhost'
      domain.uri = 'qemu:///system'
      domain.memory = 512
      domain.cpus = 1
  end
  

• I also tried vagrant up --provider=kvm, vagrant up --provider=qemu, and vagrant up --provider=libvirt too, to no avail.

Is there any step that I've missed? Or another package/dependency that needs to be installed?

Edit: After the adding centos/7 using vagrant, it shows up when running vagrant box list.

$ vagrant box list
centos/7 (libvirt, 1611.01)

Answer 1

Start vagrant box with command

vagrant up --provider=kvm

Although it has been said in https://seven.centos.org/2017/08/updated-centos-vagrant-images-available-v1707-01/ that

The vagrant-libvirt plugin is only compatible with Vagrant 1.5 to 1.8

Answer 2

You can use either the command line option --provider=kvm or you can set the VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER environment variable:

export VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER=kvm  # <-- may be in ~/.profile, /etc/profile, or elsewhere

vagrant up

Answer 3

vagrant-libvirt(0.0.40) is compatible with Vagrant 2.0.2 if you are running Ruby 2.3, at least on Linux Mint 18.3 (Ubuntu 16.04). I used vagrant from the Debian download on the vagrantUp website and installed the plugin using it without any problem.